Supreme Court ruling frees your genes, opens market

12:05 AM,
Jun. 17, 2013

A technician loads patient samples into a machine for testing at Myriad Genetics in Salt Lake City. The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Myriad Genetic cannot patent the genes that are tested to check a woman's risk for breast and ovarian cancer.

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USA Today

Cases that get to the Supreme Court often involve complex issues over which the justices can reasonably disagree: Obamacare, "partial birth abortion" and the disputed Bush-Gore election, just to name a few. Affirmative action and gay marriage, expected to be decided later this month, are other examples.

But sometimes the question before the court turns out to be as obvious as it looks to non-lawyers, namely: Can a company patent the naturally occurring genes that make up every human being's DNA?

In a gratifyingly unanimous decision Thursday, all nine justices held that a gene is a product ...